The practice of medicine involves obtaining, evaluating and analyzing information drawn from a variety of sources; thus physicians assess and act upon information that varies in terms of both reliability and the extent to which it may be directly perceived. In the hospital setting, physicians’ progress notes provide a record of this process that serves as a primary means of communication between treaters who are not co-present with one another; accordingly, in order to permit independent evaluation of the information they contain, physicians have developed a repertoire of linguistic devices to express differing attitudes towards the information that their notes convey. In this article, through the microanalysis of a pediatric resident’s note, I demonstrate how physicians use evidential markers, including the passive voice and agentless constructions, to construct frameworks of credibility and responsibility that both underlie and enable medical work. These grammatical devices permit the physician-reader to weigh for himself or herself the evidence which supports the conclusions reached.
Although lawyers’ courtroom language has been the subject of sociolinguistic research, most of this research has focused on the questioning of witnesses; thus few studies have examined the processes by which lawyers’ interpretations of the evidence are presented to the jury. This article illustrates lawyers’ use of impression management in their opening statements and closing arguments to construct a shared identity with jurors, in order to persuade them to affiliate with the lawyer’s point of view. Through the analysis of a segment of a prosecutor’s rebuttal argument in a criminal trial, this article demonstrates how a Black attorney addressing a predominantly Black jury uses the stylistic and rhetorical dimensions of African American vernacular English (AAVE) to construct this shared identity.
In contemporary American society, the relaxation of social prohibitions on vulgar language, together with what some have noted to be an advertising culture that appears to demand hyperbole, combine to create an environment where much language that was formerly impermissible is now allowed. Nevertheless, a small number of words have retained their taboo status, most notably the word fuck. The word also displays our cultural ambivalence about sexual expressions and sexual activity, not only because it is considered to be obscene, but because of the question that was memorably expanded upon by comedian Lenny Bruce: If fucking is so great, then why is Fuck you one of the most offensive retorts in the English language? This paper will provide an answer to that question. I argue that the word fuck functions as a metaphor for male sexual aggression, and that, notwithstanding its increasing public use, enduring cultural models that inform our beliefs about the nature of sexuality and sexual acts preserve its status as a vile utterance that continues to inspire moral outrage.
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